Morrissey has strong bond with Latinos

The story, in all its breathless and wistful retellings, has taken on the air of myth. It takes place in 1999 at University of California, Irvine, where Morrissey is performing on his "Oye Esteban" tour. Moz looks out at his mostly Latino audience and tells them, "I wish I was born Mexican."

The story, in all its breathless and wistful retellings, has taken on the air of myth.

It takes place in 1999 at University of California, Irvine, where Morrissey is performing on his "Oye Esteban" tour. Moz looks out at his mostly Latino audience and tells them, "I wish I was born Mexican."

Seriously. I mean, I wasn't there, but I believe it.

Now, almost a decade later, the near-religious ardor Morrissey inspires among many young Latinos has been noted and analyzed. In his 2002 paper " 'Do you still love me like you used to?': Reappropriating Morrissey," Canadian academic Colin Snowsell wrote, "Morrissey's popularity in Latin America and to Latino fans in Southern California has increased rapidly and seemingly in direct proportion to the massive erosion of his original fan base."

Still, for many, the relationship continues to baffle. Morrissey kicks off a North American tour tonight at the Bob Hope Theatre.

Steven Patrick Morrissey was raised in Manchester, England, by Irish Catholic immigrants. In 1982, he and guitarist Johnny Marr formed The Smiths. The band dissolved five years later but has been heralded as one of the most influential acts in rock history. In 1988, Morrissey launched his solo career with the album "Viva Hate."

While 1999's UCI moment might have encapsulated the soul of the Latino-Morrissey romance, it is hardly the only token of affinity to spring from it. A few years later, por ejemplo, Moz shared the stage with Jaguares, on the rock en espanol group's "Revolucion 2002" tour.

Wallie Mason, a lawyer and Discovery Bay resident, has been listening to Morrissey since 1987. She will be at tonight's concert after seeing him two months ago in Pasadena. At that show, Mason noted, many of the concertgoers were Latino.

"I feel like it has to do with alienation," she said of the attraction. "If you know about Morrissey, he's the son of two Irish immigrants. I think there's some parallels between the Latino community in the U.S. and the experience of being Irish in England, of belonging and not belonging. There's a current in his writing that touches on that."

Keith Hatsceck, chairman of the music management department at University of the Pacific's Conservatory of Music, agreed that Morrissey has a "large and loyal fan base" but has not so far observed a particularly Latino affection for the singer.

Generally, Hatschek said, Morrissey attracts devotion because "quite a bit of his music has deep emotional content to it. He somehow manages to convey something in every song he sings to the audience."

Other critics of music and pop culture have noted Morrissey's ability to relate to his audience and drawn connections between his tone of opulent melancholy and that evoked in some of Mexico's ranchera music.

Take, for example, my 17-year-old self, lying sideways on my bed with my feet against a wall in a northeast outpost Moz Angeles. I am gloomy over some unrequited affection.

I suppose I could just as easily have been listening to the ranchera, "Noches Eternas:" "How eternal are my nights, how slow is my agony, how sad is my life, to live thinking about you."

But in his 2002 take on the Morrissey-Latino subject, the Orange County Weekly's Gustavo Arellano noted that Latino Moz fans don't necessarily connect his music to their ethnic upbringing. All the same, there remains in our culture a taste for the slightly cloying, the nearly overwrought, the delightfully macabre. (See flan, telenovelas or el Dia de los Muertos.)

In that context, maybe Morrissey makes some sense.

Vanessa Valdez has been a fan since she was 12. The Stockton woman, now 20, said, "I like how his voice, it's very distinct. Maybe it's just the lyrics and, I don't know, the messages in the songs. I mean, 'Irish Blood, English Heart'! He knows what I'm feeling."